“Welcome to the Correctional Resettlement Initiative, prisoner!”
The voice projecting from the speakers of your new orientation cell is the most pleasant one you’ve heard since you first entered lockup in the Hegemony’s Shiroyama Orbital Rehabilitation Facility. This can’t bode well. Undeterred by your reservations, it continues, “From among hundreds of millions of your fellow convicts across settled space, you have been selected for an exciting new opportunity in criminal rehabilitation, as provided by Executive Order 4094.”
The viewscreen in the wall lights up with images from a frozen world, with a purplish-pink sky. Warmly-dressed people bustle about in a small but thriving colony, though many of them stop to smile and wave at the camera. The voice narrates, “Here, you can see the former prisoners – now colonists – of Eridani F. They will be repaying their debts to society for the rest of their lives, but they’ll be doing so while enjoying the freedom of friendship, fresh air, rewarding labor, and unsupervised personal leisure.” The image shifts to one of a red, desert world, spinning dozens of kilometers below. “And, now, you will also enjoy that kind of freedom, while making your own restitution to the institutions and citizens of the Hegemony!”
A brief series of slides follows, revealing the surface of a hellish planet of rust-colored dust and jagged rock, in which the air ripples continually with punishing waves of blistering heat. “You have been selected for resettlement on Tau Remus 7d. In just a few moments, you will have the option of perusing an interactive informational presentation about your new homeworld, so that you can familiarize yourself with local conditions, the native biota, and other important details about the new life you’ll be building for yourself, carving out a foothold for future generations of settlers.”
Next, the camera pans over pieces of mining equipment, shining and new. “During your remaining time in Shiroyama Orbital Rehabilitation Facility, you will familiarize yourself with these and other technologies, suitable to your forthcoming career as a miner. You will be extracting and processing the valuable isotope, tantalum-180m, for use throughout the entire Hegemony. Your work will help to create…” a series of images corresponds to each item as the voice reads it off, “…powerful new computers… state of the art cybernetics… improved stellar energy collection panels… even faster jump drives… and the military hardware that allows the Hegemony to keep its people safe and secure against all threats, both internal and external.”
The voice drones on, but it’s shit. It’s all shit.
You know what this is: they’re throwing you away – exiling you to hell, so that you can die quietly, making money for the people who matter, and no one will notice or care.
Tau Remus 7d – commonly referred to by the abbreviation of TR7d – is an isolated world, far off the beaten path of any regular interstellar routes. For a number of reasons, such is the rule for planets chosen for the Hegemony’s Executive Order 4094: the so-called “Correctional Resettlement Initiative.”
Tantalum-180m, used in a wide variety of industrial and medical applications, is TR7d’s primary commodity. The isotope exists in uncommonly high concentrations in the planet’s lower crust and upper mantle. Extraction and refinement is difficult and dangerous, and unpredictable electromagnetic storms make the prospect of robotic mining prohibitively expensive. Convicts, on the other hand, exist in almost limitless supply, and they need not be paid for their labor. Under EO4094, they are “compensated” with sentences commuted to mandatory colonial resettlement.
TR7d is a brutally arid world of roughly Earth-standard gravity (1.07 G) and comparable atmosphere, with midday temperatures in the so-called “temperate zones” of around 45°C, and nighttime temperatures that can dip as low as -15°C. These bands of latitude are considered to be the only parts of the planet compatible with human life, and then only under the loosest definition of such. Days are 26.25 hours in length, while years last 273.7 local days.
You are one of 250 unfortunate souls sent to this place, in accordance with the provisions of EO4094, in a ramshackle colony located in a broad, mesa-studded valley in the planet’s northern hemisphere, near some especially rich tantalum deposits. Whatever it is that you did, it earned you at least one full life sentence, and possibly more, but the Hegemony casts a pretty wide net regarding what’s worth locking someone away until their death. Murder and other heinous crimes will certainly get you locked up for the rest of your life, but so will credit counterfeiting, trade in even the most trivial sorts of contraband, tampering with the data in any governmental or major corporate network, and a host of other – rather less severe – sorts of offenses.
You’ve been on TR7d for about seven Terran months, give or take. Over that time, about 70 of your fellow colonists have died – whether from injuries or disease, the attacks of native predators, dehydration or heatstroke… or at the hands of their fellow exiles.
A rough council of gangs presides over the colony, though Kailin Czaydow’s faction – over 50 members strong – rules the roost. Kailin is an iron-fisted tyrant, but her people have claimed the best territory in the colony, and seized the best material resources (which has allowed them to create the best weapons – including the only energy weapons – on the planet), so everyone else falls in line. She’s known to cut off access to water for those who don’t display sufficient deference to her authority. After no more than a couple of days of that, everyone comes crawling, begging for forgiveness. Most of the time, she even grants it.
Welcome to hell. No one’s expecting you to survive your stay.
Hosted and narrated by:
Stephen Michael DiPesa (Nocturnalchemy)
Completed 07/11/19.
Scenes played: 16
License: Community License
18+
